ATLANTA - Georgia's legal defense system for the poor is a patchwork mechanism that produces checkered results and fails to defend their basic constitutional rights, a commission warned the state's top court Thursday.
The panel called for a state-funded, state-managed public defender system to replace an assortment of programs now run by counties and funded primarily through local tax dollars.
Chief Justice Norman Fletcher of the state Supreme Court, which appointed the panel two years ago, called the recommendations "a historic moment in the life of the court."
He said Georgia cannot afford to allow the report to gather dust, and he urged commission members, lawyers, judges and activists to push state leaders to adopt the recommendations.
Gov.-elect Sonny Perdue, who will be faced with cutting the state budget in January because of months of weak tax collections, sent attorney Bruce Bowers to listen to the presentation of the report.
"There's no question about the importance of the work they've done, but without having a chance to look at it and study the budget implications of it, any kind of comment, as you know, is going to be premature," Mr. Bowers said.
Key policymakers have warned for years that the state risks a federal lawsuit and costly corrective action unless it finds a better way to provide legal representation for the nearly 80 percent of criminal defendants too poor to hire a lawyer.
Lawyers assigned to poor clients often are swamped with cases, critics contend, and are forced to hustle through the cases with little preparation.
The commission's report relied in part on a study by a Massachusetts consulting company, the Spangenberg Group, which sent researchers to 19 of the state's 159 counties and conducted interviews with hundreds of officials statewide.
The group found that none of the 19 counties provided sufficient funds to assure quality representation to all indigent defendants.
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